Why You Are Seeing This Dating App Popping Up Everywhere

There’s a new app on the Apple App Store that’s trying to turn “hot or not” into something a little more special.

Tinder, launched in September by cofounders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, is quickly picking up traction as a new twist on dating. Instead of showing you photos of other random individuals, it connects to your Facebook profile to deliver more targeted results in the hope that it’ll connect you to someone you are actually interested in dating.

Here’s how the app works: You connect to your Facebook profile, and it grabs four photos to use as your profile photos on Tinder. It then shows you photos of other members, and you swipe left to say you don’t like them, or right to say you like them. If you and the other Tinder member both say you like each other, it’ll open up a chat prompt.

Around 70% of the time, that connection leads to a “meaningful conversation,” said CEO Rad. So far, there have been more than 10 million matches in the app.

According to AppData, the app has more than 100,000 users connected through Facebook checking the app every day, though in reality the number is much higher than that, Rad said.

It’s certainly not Snapchat, which is at the top of the Apple App Store. But right now it’s in the top 100 apps and continues to slowly climb the ranks, according to AppData.

There are some weird parts. For example, the app currently shows some members who are 17 years old for matches. That’s changing soon, and was originally instituted as a way for college freshmen to see their friends, Rad said. But the idea is that only minors will see other minors, and those over 18 will see others over 18 — designated by your profile. Tinder is piggybacking on Facebook’s privacy scrutiny to ensure it remains a safe environment.

“If someone is trying to do something malicious, Facebook has probably caught that person already and they probably won’t be on Tinder,” Rad said.

To find out more, we spoke with Rad to see how quickly the app is growing. Here’s an edited transcript of the interview:

WSJ: What is the background on the new app?

SEAN RAD: We launched in early September. The idea behind Tinder is, basically, we’re solving a few main issues that we find with dating for our generation. Today open an app like Blendr and immediately you’re struck with profiles that don’t look genuine, so many question marks like “is this the person i’m talking to,” et cetera. The user experience on dating apps is also fairly weak. You’re liking all these people and they rarely respond. As a girl, you’re getting all these messages and you’re getting bombarded by people you don’t want to talk to. There’s this big sense of rejection from everyone because you have to do so much to get a response. We’re constantly approaching people and doing things with some sort of fear involved.

If you look at online dating apps, they have a very long on-boarding process. You have to fill pages and pages of information about yourself. It also creates this sense of desperation for users, you’re going through leaps and bounds to join something. Tinder took all those problems we were facing and created a user experience that addressed them. When you’re looking at people, these are people we think are relevant to you based on a variety of metrics. We immediately show you people we think you are going to like. If someone you like happens to like you back, we create a match. If you can create that context for people and take down the barrier, you’re starting that relationship or conversation at a whole new level.

Tinder

WSJ: How big is Tinder? AppData says you have more than 100,000 users.

RAD: It’s far, far greater than 100,000, AppData isn’t really accurate. We grew by 700% last month. We’ve grown over 750% in the last 30 days, and we’re right now seeing about 50 million daily profile reads. 50 million times a day, there’s a unique incident of a like or dislike. To date, we’ve created about 10 million matches. There’s millions of messages being exchanged every single day, they’re deep connections leading to some serious conversations. It started as sort of an experiment, but to our shock it’s working much better than we ever anticipated.

WSJ: Are some regions faring better than others?

RAD: We have a fairly distributed user base, San Francisco is actually a pretty large market for us. We’re all over the U.S., we have pockets of users in every major city. Our top cities are Los Angeles, New York, Boston, Dallas and San Francisco. Boston’s grown big time in the last 30 days, particularly among the college crowd. We have a fairly large presence in San Francisco.

WSJ: How many of those “matches” end in a conversation?

RAD: Our conversion from match to meaningful conversation is very high, it’s a little more than 70%. A little more than that results in a two-way exchange. I will say, metaphorically we could be compared to a hot-or-not app, but there’s a massive difference between Tinder and Hot-or-Not. The people you see in hot-or-not apps are entirely random. With Tinder, you see relevant data points. Whether it’s profile pictures only based on Facebook, that creates that sense of legitimacy and trust…The most important thing at end of day is people are looking for a match, that’s the holy grail of any dating experience. Part of the reason we’re growing so fast is, we are creating meaningful matches. They result in stories, friends meeting friends, and that helps it spread.

WSJ: Is there any risk to connecting individuals who are under 18 to those over 18?

RAD: We restrict everything to Facebook. Whatever you put on Tinder, whether it’s your age or picture, has to coincide with something you advertise on Facebook. It helps you stay honest. We’re also piggybacking off measures Facebook takes to monitor its user base. If someone is trying to do something malicious, Facebook has probably caught that person already and they probably won’t be on Tinder. If you’re under the age of 18, we won’t show you to anyone over the age of 18. Minors see minors, and everyone above sees that.

We are showing 17-year-olds to older demographics right now but we’re gonna do away with that very soon, the only reason we were doing that was because freshmen in college couldn’t see their friends initially. Though, through the inherent activity of Tinder, it’s a self-policing environment. We don’t allow anyone to message anyone, you have to approve that person and that needs to be a two-way exchange. Just by limiting conversations to mutual connections, it drastically reduces the chance of malicious behavior. You can like who you want but that person doesn’t have to like you back. With our security measures, we haven’t had one problem or one report of malicious activity.

WSJ: Are there other matching algorithms?

RAD: We’re looking at implicit behavior on Tinder and creating more relevant suggestions based on who you’re liking and not liking. Aside from that, as relevant as we can get with algorithms and computers. At the end of the day, whether someone is attracted to you and whether you have common friends, that’s going to be the key differentiation. We compare Tinder to the experience walking to a bar. You see someone, there’s an attraction based on their personality and looks and the way the move, and you decide to talk to that person based on the fact you have mutual friends or are in the same social groups. We’re trying to emulate that behavior and movement.

WSJ: Are you always serving up new people? A lot of users seem to be complaining about duplicates.

RAD: It wasn’t intentional, it was a result of stuff going too fast. The team has been awake for pretty much two weeks now trying to scale. It wasn’t a bug, it was design limitation. Things were hitting their peak in the back-end which was causing duplicates, that should all be resolved now.

WSJ: How big is the market for an app like this?

RAD: I would say is helping people meet new people is in my opinion the biggest, most untapped opportunity that exists today when it comes to social. Facebook has done a phenomenal job to help you manage relationships with people you know. The holy grail, though, is how to solve that natural human loneliness problem.

In our context it’s the case of dating. But that’s the single biggest purpose of meeting new people outside of business. There’s over 1 billion on Facebook and let’s assume 50% of them are single. If you look at the market of single people on Facebook and compare it to the market of people using dating apps, there’s a massive, massive discrepancy there. The actual market goes way beyond that.